Annette Lynn Selix was an 11-year-old girl from Cottonwood near Anderson, California, who disappeared on the evening of Sunday, August 13, 1978, after leaving home to buy groceries. Her body was found the next morning 105 feet below the Antlers Bridge on Interstate 5, wearing only blood-spattered underwear. The autopsy determined she had been raped, forced to perform oral sex and then thrown from the bridge while alive; she suffered multiple fractures, massive internal bleeding and fatal aspiration of blood.

Investigators reported distinct bite marks on her thigh that were later matched to Darrell Keith Rich. Detectives traced the groceries she had bought—two cans of Squirt soda and tubs of margarine—to Rich’s refrigerator during a consent search, and recovered hair and blood samples under warrant. Rich, a 23-year-old saw-mill worker known locally as the Hilltop Rapist who had worked with the victim’s mother, failed a polygraph on August 23, was arrested that night, confessed on tape and gave a handwritten list of crimes. In January 1981 a Shasta County jury convicted Rich of four murders, including Selix’s, and numerous sexual assaults; the Selix count was pivotal in the death-penalty verdict.

Does anyone have memories or information about Cottonwood or the Antlers Bridge area in August 1978 that could add context to this case?